engtech

It took me about a decade to realize this, but it's a lot more fun to work for companies where your quirky hobbies fit in, rather than companies where they would look down on you because you think that casual fridays mean "sexy pichaku".

"In an interview, the interviewer literally has all the power, and saying "no" or refusing to answer a question posed by the interviewer seems rather difficult."

If you feel like the interviewer has all the power in an interview, then it'll be difficult to negotiate your salary. You'll do things like give a concrete number when they ask you what your salary was at your last job.

The only time I would feel like an interviewer has all the power over me is if I was a new grad with no work experience.

An interview is a two-way street, you're trying to find out if you want to work for them as much as they're trying to find out if they want to hire you.

It's the difference between having a team of people vs working alone.

The comic book industry at a minimum would have a writer, artist, editor. In reality they have an entire ecosystem of people because they are a corporation.

If it wasn't for the proceeds from doing movies with non-creator-owned IP, I doubt that Marvel and DC would still exist.

I would love it if they went subscription based for access to old digital releases and pay-as-you-go for 6 month old content.

There's a lot of former comic book geeks who have gotten out of the habit because shelling out $100-150 a month on comics is kind of ridiculous when you have a mortgage, day care, and car payments and don't even have time to read comics anyways.

As a non-US guy, this is pretty cool.

It's working really well for live updating.

"I had fun once, it was horrible."

As an owner of an iPad 1 that is blocked from getting iOS 6, it's tragic that iTunes won't automatically keep the last version of my apps before they upgrade to iOS 6. So as time goes by I'm going to lose all my software for my iPad if I update apps in iTunes. :(

Moral hazard indeed.

I'm not an MS developer, but Visual Studio has had achievements for a while now, including anti-achievements for things like using a goto.

http://channel9.msdn.com/achievements/visualstudio

It may be better implemented as a firefox/chrome extension?

Given that the majority of sites will not likely have a tl;dr I am unlikely to click the bookmarklet every time I open a web page.

I am looking forward to buying hats for my photo editing software.

The lead is buried behind piano practice, but this is a great piece and worth reading.

There are causes behind why bugs are introduced, and the cause is never as simple as "that person is stupid / bad at their job".

Next step: create a Facebook app that lets you export your foldable.me to a facebook profile picture, maybe with something that lets you do a nice integration of profile picture + timeline cover photo.

foldable.me goes viral as friends see their friends use the site. You end up with tons of people using the site who would never consider paying $12 for a piece of coloured cardboard...

but once they get an emotional attachment to their avatar you can follow up with some lifecycle emails to convert them into a purchasing customer.

You could also have a feature where friends could gift their foldable.me to other friends.

We should be happy that it has gotten this far, but also sad that this is still an ongoing problem.

Are they ranked by Alexa rank?

Maybe it should be Canada's Top 100 WEB Startups? (problem with original article)

I realize that having a successful internet presence is important to a company, but I don't think it is the end-all measure of whether something is a "top startup". Is it even a valid metric unless your business is in selling advertising impressions?

  Alexa is the leading provider of free, global web metrics. Search Alexa to discover the most successful sites on the web by keyword, category, or country. Use our analytics for competitive analysis, benchmarking, market research, or business development. Use Alexa's Pro tools to optimize your company's presence on the web.

Before you get your hopes too far up, here's a bunch of sci-fi writers trying to predict 2012 in 1987.

http://www.writersofthefuture.com/time-capsule-predictions

Humans are horrible at predicting future trends beyond a couple of years.

Probably to practice being calm and relaxed, and to build deeper relationships with other people.

Did I read that correctly?

Not only did talking about twitter come before talking about exercise, but both sections deserved 3 paragraphs each?

no, but jQuery is a great way to learn how to write javascript, because it gives you a good framework of basic functionality.

The handwritten code I used to use for element detection was a thing of evil, that kept on getting cut-and-pasted around because it worked.

The conciseness and cleanness of using jQuery was a welcome change.

agreed, it took a while before I realized it was fiction.

good story, though.

Does anyone know of Doxygen <-> mind mapping tools that work well?

I'm a big fan of Doxygen for having the documentation live within the code, but I find it lacking for drawing the graphical connections between things.

I've been looking at embedding UML using plantuml, but I figure there has to be a better answer out there.

I had a hard time reading this (like others did) because I felt like I was one of the brilliant jerks he is talking about.

But there is something to the effect of a "bad apple" on the barrel as a whole: http://www.inc.com/matthew-swyers/toss-the-bad-apple-employe...

From my own experience, the best way to diffuse me when I'm turning into the "brilliant jerk" is to give me some projects with some breathing room. I'm a lot less jerky when I having being through a serial stream of "jumping on the grenade" on critical/stressful projects that were about to explode.

Very strange, I tried searching http://blog.pmarca.com for obama and romney and there were no results.

But I swear that back in 2007-2008 I remember him having blog posts about meeting Obama?

edit: found it at the archive http://pmarchive.com/an_hour_and_a_half_with_barack_obama

I guess it was just deleted over time as the blog.pmarca.com was made more professional.

It gives misleading results in that:

"password" shows in green

"1234" shows in green

"hello world" shows "hello" in green and "world" in yellow

so while you're able to calculate the entropy, it missed out on the fact that some high entropic words are still bad choices.

Can you give some concrete examples?

I realize there's a big difference between spyware on a rented computer vs Apple's MobileMe, but it does seem like there's an intersection between theft prevention location software and this case.

What are the differences between a company renting Apple devices and using MobileMe for theft preventing / tracking vs this company using custom software?

typo: absurdity (present in the original article)

Trend Micro AV is flagging this article because of storage.aunticles.com

I find "grep --universe" confusing because that should be a shortcut for searching Amazon for Carl Sagan cooking books.

   http://www.neatorama.com/2009/12/31/carl-sagans-apple-pie-recipe/

Let's try to avoid at least half the unnecessary comments on this article:

http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A+sarcasm

web browsers are doing this for malware / fraud sites.

see other comments on parent for citations.

You realize that people use the same password on multiple sites?

given that people signed up using corporate email addresses, this could be used to hack internal networks of companies.

I think it's time for web browsers to step up and start showing a visual indication for websites that store passwords in plaintext.